


Changeling

by TheSpaceCoyote



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M, a bit different, and is constantly changing, cecils heart is outside his body and its, just a little drabble, talking about hearts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-06
Updated: 2013-08-06
Packaged: 2017-12-22 14:47:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/914471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSpaceCoyote/pseuds/TheSpaceCoyote
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cecil's heart isn't exactly contained within his body. It's also not really a heart, per se. </p>
<p>Just a tiny little drabble, haha.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Changeling

**Author's Note:**

> My first Cecilos fic! I've become so enamored with both them and Welcome to Night Vale as a whole. It's just so fantastic in every way. 
> 
> Hope you like this!

Carlos had seen the Cecil's heart with his own eyes, which was hardly something that was shared between people who were dating. Usually. He hoped.

He would never have guessed that the warmth and  _distinct_  pulse coming from Cecil was being produced by a distant and physically detached source. Nothing should've genuinely surprised him anymore, and indeed the revelation wasn't  _shocking,_  not really. Nor was it expected, it just sort of. Well. Was.

However, he  _was_  surprised that Cecil almost sounded offended at the notion that he would keep important organs within the confines of his body.

"Why would I keep my heart  _inside_  my body? Have you seen what happens to people's bodies? No, it's much safer to keep it out of harm's way, don't you think?" He snorted, blowing the froth on the top of his coffee into dermatoglyphs, "Keeping a heart inside one's body, now that's just  _irresponsible_. And, not to mention, in violation of the City Council-mandated circulatory autoscopy imposed on those individuals born between the first and four-fifths vernal equinox."

Carlos had tried to use that information to decipher when exactly Cecil was born. He was still stuck on determining when and how equinoxes could be split into fractions. 

Anyway, it (being the heart, of course) was suspended half a foot above the credenza in Cecil's apartment; circled by stacks of expired catalogues of wedding cakes, objects wrapped in tape and parchment paper that may have been snowglobes, big old tomes made out of a dry leather with impressions inlaid with fang, and made out of a thick, cratered plaster that rippled like a dry, cracked lake bottom with every sluggish beat. It had looked like that the first time he had seen it. Since then it'd been made of something different with each viewing; sometimes changing substance and state between difference instances within the same visit to Cecil's apartment. Sometimes it was made of spray-painted styrofoam, sometimes of metal so red and rusted that he wondered how it even still held its shape. Sometimes it was made out of a liquid that by all right should not be able to cohere together in the shape of a human heart but there it was, beating some kind of black, treacly jelly backwards through the aorta across the pair of displaced lungs and then back out of the vena cava to disappear into thin air. Or, he guessed, into Cecil. 

One day it was nothing more than beautifully spun, ethereal glass that looked like a soap bubble blown perfectly into the heart's shape. Little rainbows danced along the cords of myocardium and the little tributary of overlying capillary. Light (from no obvious source, he noted absently) reflected from its surface and scattered into pinpricks; inexplicably green and shaped like ampersands. 

Carlos supposed he was lucky that it was, at least, anatomically correct in accordance with the diagrams and models of human hearts that he'd seen and studied during his schooling. Of course, he had no idea whether the shape would one day warp and bend the space around it, or invert, or sprout chitinous legs and scuttle away under the coffee table. He'd come to learn that any instances of normalcy were typically just guises put on top the weird, and had to be taken with a grain of salt. 

Metaphorically, as yesterday all table salts in Nightvale had suffered a catastrophic and so far permanent chemical dissociation. 

The heart thing was pretty weird in and of itself, but it was also nice, and its changeable character definitely provided an easy topic of conversation. Once, it had been made out of black mortar and stained glass in both colors he'd seen before and some he hadn't and couldn't even begin to give a name, and he'd been stunned by it until Cecil had come up behind him and gently taken his hand, and then he had been stunned by something different (though really, kind of the same.)

And as they had moved to the couch with the lights still off, even in the blue and cyan twilight of the ending day, the mortar around the heart had melted clear away and the colors had blended together until it was a glowing pot of fuchsia heat; softly illuminating the curves of Carlos' body as he lay curled and content in Cecil's lap. 


End file.
